Ferondo's supposed purgatory

Ferondo's supposed purgatory is not a supernatural realm but a prison vault in an abbey, where a drugged farmer is made to believe he has died and entered Purgatory. The abbot and a trusted monk sustain the illusion with darkness, monastic clothing, beatings, and invented explanations from God. This counterfeit afterlife serves a worldly purpose: while Ferondo is hidden away, the abbot visits his wife, then arranges Ferondo's return when her pregnancy makes the deception harder to maintain.

Construction of the False Afterlife

After the powder has made Ferondo appear dead, the abbot and his Bolognese confidant secretly remove him from his tomb. They carry him to a lightless vault used as a prison for monks who have broken the abbey's rules. There they strip off his clothes, dress him as a monk, and lay him on straw to await his awakening. The setting supplies the basic conditions of the supposed afterlife: Ferondo cannot see where he is, does not know how he arrived there, and wakes in the custody of a figure ready to dictate what his surroundings mean.

The deception is prepared before Ferondo can question it. The Bolognese monk waits for him to recover, makes a frightening noise, and beats him with a rod. When Ferondo asks where he is, the monk answers that he is in Purgatory and confirms his belief that he is dead. A meal follows, explained as food his wife has sent to the church to have masses said for his soul. Ordinary provisions thus become apparent evidence of religious care, while the hidden vault and the monk's violence remain outside Ferondo's understanding.

A Punishment Made to Fit Ferondo

The monk presents the beatings as a sentence imposed by God: Ferondo is punished twice each day because he was jealous despite having, as the monk puts it, the finest wife in the country. Ferondo accepts the charge and admits that he had been jealous, though he says he did not know God considered it wrong. The supposed correction is carefully staged as both bodily punishment and moral instruction. Ferondo is not merely told that he is dead; he is told that his present suffering has a divine cause and a lesson for his conduct as a husband.

The monk also supplies a story about his own presence, saying that he too is dead and must feed and beat Ferondo because he had once praised a jealous master. This makes the captor appear to be another condemned soul rather than an agent of the abbot. Ferondo asks whether anyone else is nearby and how far they are from their homes; the monk claims that thousands are present but invisible and inaudible, and that they are beyond the reach of ordinary measures of distance. The answers turn isolation into an apparent feature of the afterlife, not a clue to the prisoner's real location.

Ferondo's responses make the fiction both comic and consequential. He blesses his wife for sending food, then complains about the wine and the lack of candles. When the monk says jealousy earned his sentence, Ferondo promises that, if he returns to life, he will be an exemplary husband and will let his wife do as she pleases. Even in the imagined realm, however, his complaints return to domestic particulars. The grand account of divine judgment is repeatedly undercut by his appetite, his concern about wine, and his promise to change only after the punishment has frightened him.

The Affair and the Return

While Ferondo remains confined, the abbot visits his wife. Disguised in Ferondo's clothes, he goes to her house with the monk who knows the secret, and the villagers who see him believe that Ferondo is abroad doing penance. The wife knows otherwise. The apparent journey of a dead man through the countryside is therefore not a miracle but part of the cover for the abbot's repeated visits.

Ferondo spends about ten months in the vault, eating and drinking while the monk beats him and the abbot continues the affair. When the wife becomes pregnant, she and the abbot decide that Ferondo must be returned so that she can claim the child as her husband's. The abbot then uses the same strategy that began the imprisonment: wine mixed with enough powder to put Ferondo to sleep for several hours. A counterfeit voice tells the prisoner that God has decided he may return to the world and have a son by his wife, naming the child Benedict. The monk and abbot dress him in his own clothes and secretly place him back in the tomb.

At dawn, Ferondo sees light through a crack, something he has not seen for nearly ten months, and concludes that he is alive again. He pushes at the tomb lid and cries out. The monks flee in alarm; the abbot, by contrast, presents himself as emerging from prayer and leads them back with a cross and holy water, staging the discovery as a public sign of divine power. Ferondo kneels before him, convinced that the abbot's prayers and those of Saint Benedict and his wife have released him from Purgatory.

Consequences and Narrative Significance

The deception continues after Ferondo leaves the tomb. At home, he tells villagers elaborate stories about the souls in Purgatory and about what he claims was revealed to him before his return. The abbot's private fraud becomes public religious spectacle: Ferondo's fabricated testimony and the staged discovery encourage the community to treat the episode as a miracle. Ferondo also resumes possession of his property and believes that the child born in due time is his own son, Benedict Ferondi. The ending exposes how completely the false explanation has been made to serve the abbot's needs, from concealing the affair to supplying a story that can be repeated in public.

The supposed purgatory depends on a sharp contrast between the authority invoked and the means actually used. The abbot and monk control Ferondo's body and information, then present their manufactured events as knowledge of God's judgment. The tale's humor comes from Ferondo's credulous, practical replies, but the arrangement also makes the fraud plain: the prisoner's suffering is not a divine sentence, and his release is not a miracle. A mock afterlife has been built out of a vault, a rod, a sleeping drug, and a calculated performance of piety.